Nights at the Louvre I: Ancient Egypt

The Louvre is a place best visited in the evening. That’s when it is least crowded. But dusk also gives it a special atmosphere.

However, when going in the evening – I went there around 7 p.m. – also means that you do best in choosing one of its departments rather than attempting to see the whole museum at once. Because, guess what!? The Louvre is pretty big, and you don’t want to stress yourself trying to see everything at once. So when a friend and I went for the first time, we rather spontaneously decided to go and see the permanent exhibition on Ancient Egypt.

            The Louvre’s collection is impressive, there’s everything from a pretty simple wooden chair, over old, original papyrus scrolls, to jewelry and huge statues and pillars. And even a mummy, but more about that later. The exhibition is chronological, leading you from very ancient Egypt to less ancient Egypt, past the thing mentioned above, and a lot more. I still can’t decide what’s more fascinating, a statue of a cat with her kittens that’s about as big as my thumb, or the large statues of gods and goddesses sternly staring down at you from their plinths.

 It’s all so fascinating that it’s almost too much to take in – I’m pretty sure that if I were to go to the exhibition today, I would find a hundred other things to gush about, that just escaped my notice the last time (it’s a good time I still have all of January to do some (re-)visiting).

                      After several rooms of exhibis like these, one is lead up a staircase into a room that exhibits sarcophagi. Rows and rows of sarcophagi that fit into each other, like the different parts of a matryoshka doll. The paintings on these alone would be worth another visit. 

And then, behind this formidable collection, in a quiet corner is the mummy I mentioned earlier. It’s fascinating, and more than a little creepy – especially at night. Even though you know perfectly well that these remains are several thousand years old, and that horror stories about mummies coming to live are just that, you almost expect it to sit up every second, its fingers clawing at the bandages. They’re all wrapped singly, the fingers. We couldn’t stay looking at it for too long, especially because we were the only visitors in that section at the moment.

            The section on Ancient Egypt ends shortly after the mummy, almost imperceptibly going over into Ancient Greek urns. We looked at a few of these as well, but were still too taken with all we had seen before to really honor their beauty, and since it was almost closing time, we decided to call it a day and go home. But that definitely wasn’t the last night at the Louvre!